B V 

4310 
W35 



ENING 



:.-■ 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap . (topyright No 

Shelf_rWj3_5 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



.;- 



AT THE EVENING HOUR 



Simple Talks on Spiritual Subjects 



ETHELBERT D. WARFIELD, LL.D. 

President of Lafayette College 



PHILADELPHIA 

THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 

1898 



The Library 
of Congress 



WASHINGTON 






18448 



Copyright, 1898, by The Trustees of 
The Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath- 
School Work 







*- 



COPY 



^WSSefr^.^ 



PREFACE. 

These little papers are chiefly selections 
from the addresses made to the students of 
Lafayette College at the Sunday afternoon 
service. 

They have also in most cases been pub- 
lished in such papers as the Sunday School 
Times, the New York Observer, and the 
Presbyterian Messenger. They are now 
published in the hope that they may bring 
a message of cheer to others who are seek- 
ing to live for Christ and his service. 

Lafayette College, January, 1898. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

"Let Him Who Loves Me Follow Me" .... 7 

Loyalty to Evil 15 

Christian Aspiration 27 

The Lesson of Solomon's Decline 37 

The Longing of the Soul for God 45 

The Christian's " Cordon Bleu " . . 53 

The Beauty of Boyhood 65 

True Manhood 77 

Responsibility 89 

College Life and College Learning 99 

5 



"Let Him Who Loves Me 
Follow Me." 



IN the early years of the sixteenth century, 
Italy, under the influence of her renewed 
youth, had reached the zenith of her great- 
ness in literature and art, but was fast grav- 
itating to the nadir of public spirit. While 
Leonardo depicted the Last Supper of the 
Lord on earth, and Raphael his Transfig- 
uration, while Michelangelo painted the 
mingled sweetness and sorrow of the Last 
Judgment, and Bramante planned the world's 
greatest cathedral, the popes who were their 
patrons filled the church with scandals, and 
the princes who were their natural rulers 
destroyed the privileges of the people, or 
invited foreign foes to aid them in their trea- 
sonous ambitions. 

At length the French and the Spaniards 
occupied the whole of Italy, and in the early 



8 At the Evening Hour, 

part of the year 1 5 12 the question of suprem- 
acy was fought out between these powers 
beneath the historic walls of Ravenna. 

The Spaniards were the seasoned soldiery 
of Gonsalvo da Cordova, the " Great Cap- 
tain," the veterans who had won the lovely 
city of Granada and the vine-clad slopes of 
Andaluz from the Moor, and had overrun 
the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The 
French were but a broken remnant of the 
brilliant army which Louis XII. had sent to 
maintain his rights in Italy, but for a moment 
it was galvanized into activity by the gal- 
lantry of its general, the youthful Gaston 
de Foix, the nephew of the king. Scarcely 
more than a boy in years, he had but 
recently come into Italy ; but his vigor and 
energy, the reputation which he had already 
won, and the spell of his personality, had in 
a moment revived the hopes of the army, 
and enabled him to assume the offensive. 

The battle was waged with varying for- 
tune. At length, when the triumph of the 
French seemed assured, there came a change 
in the tide of battle. Two battalions of 
the Spanish infantry, the wonder of the age, 



" Let Him Who Loves Me Follow Me." 9 

were about to break through their all but 
victorious foemen. The young general de- 
termined to avert this, and prepared to lead 
a charge. Those about him strove to pre- 
vent so hazardous an adventure, but in vain. 
As they still urged him, pressing round 
him on the field, he suddenly broke from 
them, crying, " Let him who loves me follow 
me !" and spurred upon the foe. For a 
moment they paused. Then every gentle- 
man of France, every battle-scarred merce- 
nary, every stout burgher and peasant pike- 
man, followed where he led, with that brave 
call, " Let him who loves me follow me !" 
ringing in his ears. 

The Spaniards, not used to falter, faltered 
at that shock ; the lions of Aragon and the 
castles of Castile gave way before the lilies 
of France, and the trumpets and clarions 
pealed forth gladly the notes of triumph. 
But the noblest lay round their leader slain. 
They had heard his call, " Let him who 
loves me follow me !" and they had followed 
him to " death and glorious victory." They 
followed him, even unto death, for the love 
they bore him. They followed him, they 



io At the Evening Hour, 

died with him, though with them perished 
the cause they served. 

Louis, when he heard the story of that 
fatal field, exclaimed that he would rather 
have lost Italy than that gallant boy. Well 
might he say so, for in losing him he lost 
Italy. 

Gaston de Foix knew, as he faced that 
serried row of lances, that there was not a 
man among those who bade him stay but 
would follow where he led. He knew, not 
by any calculation of the doctrine of prob- 
abilities, not from any deduction from a large 
number of observed instances justifying a 
general law, but from an inborn instinct of 
command, that he held the hearts of those 
men in his hand; that, when he conjured 
with the spell of the love they bore him, he 
used no doubtful magic. When, above the 
tumult of the battle, rose that day the notes 
of his young voice, strident and clear, " Let 
him who loves me," each man who heard 
him knew that they were a personal appeal 
to him. None stopped to parley, none to 
ask again. They loved him, therefore they 
followed where he led. 



"Let Him Who Loves Me Follow Me." it 

Across the centuries comes the call of one 
who hath loved us unto the death, bidding 
us follow him. We have not loved him 
first, but he has loved us, even from the 
foundation of the world. He saith to us, 
" If any man will come after me, let him . . . 
take up his cross, and follow me." 

Who is this that speaks to us thus ? He 
is the Captain of our salvation. His right 
to our allegiance is absolute, because he is 
the Son of God. But he does not base his 
call on this claim, which he might justly 
assert, but on the character of the service. 
It is a good service, a service in itself joyous, 
in which those who are employed are enno- 
bled by the cause they serve, and in which 
victory is sure. 

The men who followed Gaston de Foix on 
that memorable day knew that they were 
doing a foolhardy thing ; they did not know 
that it would be a thing remembered through 
many generations. They knew it was to end 
in almost certain death ; they did not know 
that it was to be crowned with glory. They 
followed, not for glory, nor for the fruits of 
victory, but for the love of him who called 



12 At the Evening Hour. 

them. Theirs was a hard service, and its 
reward was death. 

Those who follow Christ know that they 
are doing the wisest possible act ; they are 
able to read in the countless examples of 
men in many generations the results of such 
a following of him. They know that it 
means effort, constant, unfailing courage, 
boldness, faithfulness. They know that it 
means the giving up of all sinful pleasures ; 
but they know also that it means, even in 
this world, triumph ; that the Christian wins 
from all good men respect and confidence, 
and wrings from bad men even a grudging, 
but no less real, trust and acknowledgment 
of qualities which they do not covet, yet 
must needs admire; and, at the end, fear- 
less death, and, as we confidently believe, 
endless life beyond the grave. The Chris- 
tian does not need to take thought how 
he shall die bravely, for he who has lived 
well need take no thought how he shall 
die. 

Gaston de Foix appealed to his followers 
without doubting their willingness to follow. 
He did not wait to see if they would follow, 



"Let Him Who Loves Me Follow Me/' 13 

but plunged into the fray. He is unfit to 
lead men who has no confidence in his 
powers of leadership. So with our Lord. 
He made his appeal. He proceeded with 
the work of atonement, and the world's 
history since he hung on the cross of 
Calvary is the proof of the power of that 
appeal, of the capacity for leadership in him 
who is our Leader. 

" Follow me." These words were con- 
stantly on the Lord's lips. " Follow me." 
Whither? Through sorrow and pain and 
denial, through self-sacrificing labors even 
unto death ; yes, it may be through all 
these but to himself, and God and heaven 
at last. 

But is this so hard ? Christ says, " My 
yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 
Many of life's noblest have suffered, and 
yet have freely chosen "rather to suffer 
affliction with the people of God, than to 
enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season." 
For the wages of sin is death, but the 
reward of them who diligently follow Christ 
is life everlasting. 

Through nineteen Christian centuries the 



14 At the Evening Hour. 

call of Christ has drawn men to him. " Let 
him who loves me follow me." 

If there had been some coward in the 
French army that day before Ravenna, he 
would have said in his heart, " No ; I do not 
love him," and would have stayed behind. 
He might have found excuse enough in 
quibbles : " How can I love one I have only 
seen a few times, and at a distance ?" " How 
can a poor soldier love a powerful prince ?" 
But they were brave and loyal men. " Let 
him who loves me " each knew was meant 
for him. 

But Christ appeals to us to come also 
because he has loved us. It is not only, 
nor chiefly — our love for him, but his love 
to us, that he appeals to. He is ready to 
receive all who will come unto God by him, 
and is willing to give us the strength where- 
with to come. The power of his Spirit is 
sufficient for us. 



Loyalty to Evil. 



" Faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." — The Idyls of 
the King. 

AMONG the great movements of modern 
times none has held the attention of 
men with greater fixity than the rise of the 
Dutch Republic, and few conflicts have dis- 
played in greater contrast the highest excel- 
lences and the greatest defects in human 
nature. Among those who stand out in 
strong relief upon the dark background of 
its earlier years no one is more conspicuous 
than Count Lamoral of Egmont. He was 
one of the most striking examples of the 
nobility of the last age of the Renaissance. 
It was his particular glory to have recovered 
from France by two splendid victories at 
St. Quentin and Gravelines all that Charles 
V. had lost during the closing years of his 
reign. But his master, Philip II., never 

15 



1 6 At the Evening Hour. 

regarded him with that admiration and grat- 
itude which was his due, and his great rival, 
the Duke of Alva, felt for him a hostility 
which was only increased by the splendor 
of these victories. But the Netherlands 
estimated them at their real worth and 
valued them the more that by them these 
loyal provinces had displayed before the 
world their right to rank in military glory 
with the more lauded chivalry of Spain. 
In the freshness of youth, of the highest 
connections, of large wealth and influ- 
ence, Egmont was sincerely devoted to the 
Roman Catholic Church. But he combined 
with this devotion a yet higher devotion to 
humanity and Christianity. When, there- 
fore, Philip began by one instrument and 
another to press with devilish ingenuity 
a hated inquisition upon his devoted sub- 
jects in the Netherlands, Egmont, together 
with the abler, but not as yet so distin- 
guished, Prince of Orange and Admiral 
Count Horn, began to resist every encroach- 
ment upon the privileges of his native land. 
As we look back upon him we are drawn' 
to him by the beauty and nobility of his 



Loyalty to Evil. 17 

life, by the simplicity and earnestness of his 
character, not less than by the ardor and 
courage of his generalship. Around him, 
too, he gathered in his splendid mediaeval 
castle a family which won the affections and 
deserved the devotion of all who knew them. 
The country came to look upon him as one 
of the three men in whom they could most 
implicitly trust. Egmont, Orange, Horn — 
these were the men who were at once 
patriots, patient and penetrating, and coun- 
selors, calm and courageous ; these were 
the men who drove Cardinal Granville with 
his hated inquisition back to Burgundy; 
these were the men who paralyzed the arm 
of the Duchess of Parma and penetrated 
the mask of Philip; these were the men 
who in triumph or in woe could be trusted 
and could be followed ; but Egmont first, 
Egmont most. 

Nevertheless, when the time came for 
Egmont to go as ambassador to Spain to 
try to win from Philip some relaxation of 
his policy, he faltered and began to fall 
away, thinking in his heart "The king's 
favor is better than life," and so to prove 
2 



1 8 At the Evening Hour* 

his loyalty to his sovereign he at length 
consented to sacrifice both his duty and 
his popularity, both his reputation and his 
future, that he might say that he was loyal 
to a fault It was Egmont alone, of the 
noble three, who sacrificed the courage of 
his convictions to his desire to serve his 
king ; it was Egmont alone who agreed to 
sacrifice innocent victims to Philip's blood- 
thirsty vindictiveness. As we now contem- 
plate him at this epoch we may weep for 
the man who has forgotten what is the 
highest loyalty ; but we cannot but see that 
in him Philip has found the very pattern of 
what a loyal subject should be. 

It was at this very time that men began 
to warn him that Philip purposed to pur- 
chase satisfaction for the outbreaks in the 
Netherlands with his blood. This informa- 
tion Orange gave, and told him what was 
the true state of the king's mind toward 
them all. But Egmont only laughed at 
him. Did he not have perfect knowledge 
of his own loyalty ? did not the world ring 
with the proofs which he had given of his 
devotion ? On every hand men began to 



Loyalty to Evil. 19 

warn him, to urge on him that he should 
betake himself to flight; to point out that 
loyalty to such a man as Philip was equiv- 
alent to selling his soul to death. But still 
conscious of the rectitude of his purpose, 
conscious of the greatness of his services, 
he laughed them to scorn. At length 
the brutal Alva came with his splendidly 
equipped army to bridle these rebels. Once 
more men warned Egmont to beware. But 
Egmont mounted his horse and rode forth 
to offer Alva the greeting which the king's 
representative deserved. Alva mocked at 
him as he appeared — Alva, who hated the 
man because of the laurels which adorned 
his brow. 

With Spanish treachery, Alva, having once 
got him in his power, held him with deceitful 
pretenses of doing him honor, but over and 
over again Spaniard and Netherlander gave 
to Egmont warnings that he should not 
trust the wily prince or his willing tool. At 
length, one day while he sat at dinner with 
Alva's son, the Prior of St. John, and a 
number of gentlemen, there came an invita- 
tion from Alva to meet him at his house at 



20 At the Evening Hoof, 

a later hour on the same afternoon. As the 
Prior read the invitation he leaned over and 
whispered to Egmont : " Count, fly instantly ; 
mount your fleetest horse and cross the 
frontier or you are lost." Trembling with 
emotion Egmont rose and left the room, 
but in an adjoining chamber he was led to 
consider that his flight might seem a con- 
fession of guilt, a confession that he had 
done something which his conscience now 
accused him of as wrong, and putting away 
from him all thought of flight he laughingly 
returned to the company and proceeded 
with them to the palace of the duke. In 
an hour he was a prisoner immured in a 
chamber to which the light of day was 
never admitted, and from which he never 
passed, not even to the mockery of a trial, 
but to perish upon the scaffold. He was 
never persuaded till the last moment that the 
king could find anything which would lead 
him to order his execution. His last words 
were words of protestation of his loyalty to 
his king. 

Every man who reads the story of Count 
Egmont is filled with wonder at the fatuity 



Loyalty to Evil. 21 

of his faith in so treacherous a prince as 
Philip. Egmont saw on every hand exam- 
ples of innocent men who suffered for no 
other reason than that they stood in Philip's 
way ; for no other reason than that they 
possessed something which the king craved. 
Yet he persisted in trusting him, condem- 
ning his life-long friend, the astute and able 
Prince of Orange, in that he turned away 
•from the king and led the way to liberty and 
life. While men condemn Egmont they 
follow his example. How many of us serve 
the prince of this world when we know what 
the end must be; how many of us stake 
•our all and the fortunes of those dear to 
us upon the favor of this world ; how many 
of us do this when right before our eyes 
lies the plain path of service of truth and 
liberty ! 

It is sometimes hard to see how that 
which seems simple and safe, straightfor- 
ward and loyal, can possibly lead any- 
where except to good. But the question 
is : Whom are we serving ? If we are 
serving the god of wealth we may become 
rich ; we may make much money ; we may 



22 At the Evening Hour. 

lay up for ourselves large stores ; but we 
may at a single turn of the market lose it 
all. No lord is more fickle than the god who 
presides over this realm. But even if we 
keep it all, what shall we answer when, like 
the man in the parable, God shall require 
our soul of us ? 

We may serve the powers which govern 
the domain of politics ; we may rise from 
the apprentice who constantly does the 
bidding of some famous politician till we 
are a representative in the Legislature, in 
Congress, in the Senate, upon the Supreme 
Bench, or in the chair of the President. But 
when the robe of office is laid aside, where 
then will our chosen influence guide us ? 
Though it make us President, it may also 
make our name to be a stench in history ; 
though it make us Chief Justice of the 
Supreme Court, our decisions may be marred 
with the blackest injustice and our name may 
be a byword in the land. 

Or if our devotion be to learning, where 
will our learning bring us? We may 
master some department of science; we 
may rise step by step from the simpler gen- 



Loyalty to Evil. 23 

eralizations till we have reached the highest 
generalization of all. But when we stand 
face to face with eternity, the wisdom of 
this world possesses no "open sesame " 
which will open to us the secrets of the 
world beyond the grave. The wisdom of 
this world is foolishness with God unless 
it is transformed by the knowledge of 
God. 

Whatever our career may be, if we are 
serving some unworthy despot, some prince 
who is usurping the place of the Prince of 
Peace, we are on the road to destruction. 
While we feel that we are leading lives of 
simple directness and of perfect loyalty to 
that career which we have marked out for 
ourselves, it is absolutely necessary that we 
should inquire into the character of him 
whom we have taken as our lord. The 
Prince of Orange warned Egmont that 
Philip was a very devil and that no man 
could trust him. But Egmont knew that 
he was his hereditary sovereign, and was 
not that enough ? So a great many men 
do not care to change the current of their 
lives ; the things of this world were given 



24 At the Evening Hour. 

them to enjoy ; the things of this world 
lead to certain courses ; they surely cannot 
do wrong if they follow the dictates of the 
nature which is theirs. Alas ! no man hath 
ever followed the mere gratification of eye, 
of ear, of tongue or of heart without finding 
that he has been loyal to a principle estab- 
lished in him, indeed, but a principle which 
is not of God. Let me whisper in your ear 
to-day, as the Prior of St. John whispered 
in the ear of Egmont on that fatal afternoon : 
Flee ! take the swiftest means at your com- 
mand and stay no longer within the power 
of this despot who claims to be your right- 
ful ruler. He does not mean to give you 
the deserts of a high and noble life, but to 
bring you down at last to a miserable and 
abject end. 

Egmont died a victim of his own folly ; 
the Prince of Orange with wise foresight 
provided a means of escape for himself — 
and so saved his country — saved his life 
and his soul, and also his country, and 
freedom of conscience for his people. And 
by so doing he prepared the way for his 
grandson to save England in her hour of 



Loyalty to Evil. 25 

need, rescue Europe from the greed of 
Louis XIV., and set a torch for the lighting 
of our own watchfires of freedom. If you 
would follow William of Orange, hear his 
motto. In the darkest days he wrote : 
" You ask if I have entered into a firm 
treaty with any great king or potentate ; to 
which I answer, that before I ever took up 
the cause of the oppressed Christians in these 
provinces, I had entered into a close alliance 
with the King of kings ; and I am firmly 
convinced that all who put their trust in him 
shall be saved by his almighty hand." 

Let not your heart be set upon the lust 
of the eye, nor the lust of the flesh, nor the 
pride of life. Put not your trust in princes, 
either of this world, or the prince of the 
power of the air, or the devil, who is subtle 
and strong. But put your trust in God, who 
is a Shield, and a Buckler, who is a wise 
Counselor, and a sure Refuge in trouble. 



Christian Aspiration* 



BY the common consent of critics, Raph- 
ael's " Transfiguration " is the greatest 
picture in the world. It is not merely this ; 
it is the greatest work of the greatest painter, 
the crowning glory of a great and glorious 
life, the final fruitage of long years of devoted 
labor, the perfect expression of genius work- 
ing under the double impulse of inspiration 
and complete self-devotion. It might be 
this and yet not touch the height it fairly 
reaches, for it might deal with an unworthy 
subject, a subject falling short in dignity or 
in permanence of power of the artist's skill 
and devotion. But the subject was not only 
worthy of the artist and his art, but, stretch- 
ing them to their utmost tension, yet proved 
them lacking. 

With true inspiration the painter tran- 
scended the canons of his art. Upon a 

27 



28 At the Evening Hour. 

single canvas he has painted two pictures. 
The one represents the summit of the moun- 
tain, and upon it, smitten with splendor, are 
stretched the three favored apostles, Peter 
and James and John, while, rising from the 
earth, Jesus and the two prophets of old hang 
suspended in celestial glory. The Saviour 
is depicted in the fullness of his ineffable 
majesty, with raiment shining, exceeding 
white as snow, so as no fuller on earth could 
white it; and, with the marvelous power 
which that magic brush alone was wholly 
master of, we see the sweetness and the 
beauty of the gentle manhood of the Son 
of man merged into the divine glory of the 
Son of God. Above him the heavens seem 
to open, and the ear of faith finds it not 
hard to hear the words, " This is my beloved 
Son, in whom I am well pleased." 

Beneath the summit of the mountain 
wrapped in its celestial radiance, in the 
heavy shadow of earthly sin and sorrow, 
is portrayed a very different scene. Here, 
with his despairing parent, is the demoniac 
boy in the throes of that horrible insanity 
which possessed him. Around them the 



Christian Aspiration, 29 

apostles, in helpless sympathy, are gathered 
in shocked and grieving groups. The 
thoughts stamped upon their faces are regret 
for their own impotence and impatience for 
their Lord's return. The motto which might 
be written beneath the picture is, " Till the 
Master comes." 

The whole painting powerfully presents 
to the eye the great need of the Great Phy- 
sician, and the divine nature of him who is 
able to heal even the most afflicted among 
men. None but the blind — the blind of 
eye or heart — can miss the lesson of this 
picture. 

It was painted by the artist at the very 
climax of his manhood ; it was still wanting 
a few finishing touches when he drooped 
and died in the fullness of his youth. We 
can scarcely imagine that such a picture 
could have been painted in any other than 
a devout frame of mind. We think that, 
surely, as he drew the woful form of that 
sin-stricken boy, the need of a Saviour's love 
must have moved in the painter's bosom ; 
that, as he traced the lineaments of that 
divine countenance, his heart must have 



3° At the Evening Hour. 

leaped within him as he cried, " My Lord 
and my God ! " But even while he labored 
on that canvas his life was spent in the 
bonds of an unholy love, and he drooped 
and died, " worn out with labor and with 
love." 

The painter's body, the poor tenement of 
clay, with genius forever flown, lay in state 
in his house, and over it, with colors still 
wet upon it, stood his greatest work. Crowds 
flocked to see the dead painter and his 
deathless picture. When the funeral cortege 
moved with the painter to his last resting 
place, the picture was borne in the proces- 
sion. It was then carried to the Vatican, 
and exhibited to the wondering world for a 
season. In each case it awoke in the hearts 
of all admiration and applause; in a few, 
envy and despair ; in each case for the painter. 
We hear nothing of men who came to wor- 
ship in their wonder, to despair at their sin, 
on seeing the Saviour so marvelously por- 
trayed. Among those in whom the sight 
awoke envy was Sebastiano del Piombo, a 
painter of a rival school. Desiring to enter 
into competition with the dead painter, he 



Christian Aspiration. 31 

chose a similar subject in the " Raising of 
Lazarus," and sought to produce a work 
worthy to share the wonder and admiration 
of the eternal city. He sought and gained 
Michelangelo's aid, and the picture he pro- 
duced was indeed great, however much it 
missed its hoped-for mark. So great was it 
that it was allowed a place beside the " Trans- 
figuration" in that papal palace, where 
priests and courtiers came to gape and 
praise. 

Thus these two great themes, both teach- 
ing the healing power of Jesus, his power 
over sickness and even the grave, stood side 
by side in the central city of Christendom. 
Surely the world came to wonder and 
to worship. Surely such portrayals of 
the power and love of Jesus swayed the 
hearts of all who looked upon them. 
Surely the Spirit of Christ moved powerfully 
upon all who came within those portals 
where priest and prelate and pope kept the 
faith of the Lord. Alas ! it was far other- 
wise. Men praised the painters and the 
pope their patron. They wondered at the 
skill, or picked a flaw in the drawing. They 



3 2 At the Evening Hour. 

pointed out the artistic handling of a drapery, 
or the marvelous modeling of an arm, but 
none stood with hearts aflame at their 
" Transfigured Lord," or cried in ecstasy 
of religious joy, "Behold the resurrection 
and the life." 

The pope was that gilded voluptuary 
John de Medici, who when he was chosen 
pope exclaimed : " The papacy is ours ; let 
us enjoy it." Raphael had died of labor 
and of love, — unhallowed love, like a fire 
burning in his bones, — died ere his manhood 
had filled its growth ; Sebastian stood a 
self-satisfied, complacent, yet jealous rival, 
coveting the crown his dead companion 
wore, and making merchandise of his 
Master. 

Goethe cynically said : " Wnnderfhatige 
Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gem'dlde" 
(Wonder-working pictures are almost always 
wretched paintings). And when we see so 
little pious purpose in the most perfect re- 
ligious paintings, we may well be tempted 
to accept the statement without its cynicism ; 
for may we not rejoice that the symbol of 
worship is more dependent on the soul of 



Christian Aspiration. 33 

the worshiper than the soul of the wor- 
shiper on a beautiful symbol ? 

This, indeed, is the lesson of these great 
pictures. The heart and mind of man may 
be drawn away from God by the very things 
which witness to us of his love and abound- 
ing goodness. 

Is this not a lesson which this generation 
needs to take to heart ? God has given us this 
world with all its beauty and its joys. He 
has given it to us, and he means us to enjoy 
it. His hand piled the mountains, crag on 
crag; his hand hollowed out the valleys 
and made level the wide and fruitful plains ; 
his hand paints the sunset and tints the 
petal of the rose. His hand, in history, has 
wrought out the splendors of civilization, 
and put into the heart of man the great 
works of art and architecture, the marvels 
of mechanics and of inventive genius. He 
gave us these things, and he means us to en- 
joy them. They are ours to use. But how? 
For his honor and glory ! 

The world has produced many men like 
Raphael, men able to paint great pictures, 
but caring little to live the beauty of those 

3 



34 At the Evening Hour* 

pictures. Such men are found in many- 
walks of life. Wise counselors, but foolish 
guides. Men whose precepts are pure, 
whose examples are pernicious. Not a few 
of the world's great orators have painted 
word pictures in which pure and noble lives 
spoke freely the words of truth, while they 
were leading lives of sin and shame. 

The Christian standard is based on pure 
and chastened desires. The heart that has 
learned to desire the things of God rather 
than the things of this world, will not be led 
away by self-love and selfish ambition. It 
is the heart that is the fountain of life. It 
is strange that this needs to be so often 
iterated and reiterated. But men with sober 
calculation are constantly seeking to attain 
the object of Christian living some other 
way. There are so many appeals to the 
intellect, so many invocations of law in our 
time, that we are almost forgetful that the 
heart must first be touched. Then, and 
then only, must the intellect be informed, 
with ever widening aspirations toward 
Christian usefulness. The man the coming 
age demands at our hands is not so much 



Christian Aspiration. 35 

the man of great powers of intellect, of rich 
culture, and of splendid powers of mind and 
of body, as he 

" Whose secret heart, with influence sweet, 
Is upward drawn to God." 



The Lesson of Solomon's Decline. 



BENOZZO GOZZOLI, the quaint, world- 
ly-minded pupil of Fra Angelico, has 
preserved for modern times the mediaeval 
view of Solomon. In his vivacious fresco 
of the last judgment on the wall of the 
Campo Santo at Pisa, he has represented 
the sheep on the one hand and the goats on 
the other, and in the foreground, immediately 
in front of the awful throne of judgment, Solo- 
mon just risen from an open grave is held 
suspended by the hair in the grasp of one 
of the attendant angels, awaiting a decision 
upon his destiny. To the schoolmen of the 
Middle Ages this question of Solomon's fate 
was a never failing source of argument. It 
delighted their minds trained to casuistry. 
It supplied them with inexhaustible figures 
of rhetoric. It abounded in incidents easily 
framed to conventional homilies. It pre- 

37 



3 8 At the Evening Hour. 

sented a most striking series of contrasts — 
of splendor with decay, of promise with 
fulfillment, of material with spiritual beauty. 
These monks and schoolmen were doubt- 
less too curious as to the fate of Solomon, and 
too careless of their own. Yet even though 
we may not seek to usurp the throne of God 
and sit in judgment upon a fellow-creature, 
we cannot easily escape the interest which is 
entangled in the complex threads of his 
career, even upon a very superficial study. 
He occupies a large place in the Scripture 
record. In the historical books, in the 
Psalms, in Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, 
and Ecclesiastes, he appears prominently. 
In the New Testament, in the Gospels and 
The Acts he appears in illustration or tradi- 
tion. His memory passes over with vigor- 
ous influences into the Mohammedan system, 
and into the traditions of kindred oriental 
peoples, while it is one of the few landmarks 
in western history of contact with the He- 
brews. He is one of the few historical person- 
ages of whom it can be truly said that his 
personality has powerfully affected the imagi- 
nation of many generations and races of 



The Lesson of Solomon's Decline. 39 

men. Destructive criticism labors in vain to 
overturn such an influence as this. Living 
at a remote period, in a region in almost 
every age isolated and apart from great 
world movements, the head of a people 
whose story is one long narrative of exclu- 
sive aims and practices, just at the time of 
his career there is a blaze of that universal 
type of thought that every age calls modern, 
a breaking forth from isolation into wide 
commercial relations, a reversal of exclusive- 
ness in a time of assimilative relationship 
with the outside world. 

The reign of Solomon gave to Israel a 
traditional epoch of national glory. Every 
subsequent age could look back to it with 
swelling pride and aspiring expectation. It 
was at once the justification of its hope and 
the type of its future glory. It was only for 
the more spiritual mind to look below the 
surface and see a physical fact and a spiritual 
lesson — the fact that God had given in this 
episode the earthly figure of his Church's 
splendor; the lesson that not in Israel's 
glory but in her humiliation was he to work 
out his so great salvation. 



4° At the Evening Hour. 

What a beautiful picture is that given us 
of Solomon's choice at the beginning of his 
reign. It is a true continuation of the spirit 
of his father's rule. Its keynote is self- 
denial; its expression, service. Jerusalem 
was still a mountain stronghold, and the 
people were still a poorly centralized and 
ill-disciplined body of tribesmen. The con- 
necting bond of religious observance was as 
yet one in theory only, not in material form. 
This we see in the very fact that it was to 
Gibeon that Solomon went to offer sacrifice. 
Though in name and by promise the Peace- 
ful, though his father looked forward to 
a settled reign for him, the outlook was 
rather for a continuation of tribal conflict 
and of family struggle for the chieftainship. 
But his answer to the offer of God is like a 
magic spell : " I am but a little child : I 
know not how to go out or come in. . . . Give 
therefore thy servant an understanding 
heart." With God's promise so much richer 
and fuller than he had dared ask, he returned 
tc his capital. With astonishing promptitude 
and courage he seized the reins of govern- 
ment. A broad and capable policy unfolded 



The Lesson of Solomon's Decline. 4* 

itself. The plans of his father were pushed 
on and larger plans developed from them. 
Alliances were strengthened and new ties 
formed. The mountain fortress was trans- 
formed into a stately city. Trade and com- 
merce grew, and with that a settled popula- 
tion, of increased personal property, capable 
of bearing a more certain taxation. Men 
having more to lose became less prone to 
reckless rebellion. The tribal chief grew 
rapidly into the national king, the king gave 
settled law, enlarging and relaxing the strait 
bonds of custom. 

We cannot tell at just what stage in 
the evolution thus going forward the keen 
edge of worldly-mindedness entered into 
the nature of the great monarch. Being 
but a man of like passions with other men, 
wealth and power and splendor were terri- 
ble temptations in themselves, and each 
opened a very Pandora's box of temptations 
and trials. The lust of the eye, and the lust 
of the flesh, and the pride of life, must all 
have daily met him in the secret places of 
his palace, the highway of the city, and at 
the gate of justice. As the temple of God 



42 At the Evening Hour, 

rose in the beauty of its graceful proportions, 
as its fragrant cedar beams were overlaid 
with gold, and gold was incrusted with 
gems, how his heart must have learned the 
lesson of magnificence. As the carver in 
wood fashioned the palm trees and the 
cherubim, and the goldsmith overlaid them, 
how his large mind must have swelled in 
artistic appreciation. How natural to go 
on building. How necessary to lay heavier 
and yet heavier burdens of taxation on his 
people. How inevitable that the houses 
should be occupied with lovely women and 
furnished with rich hangings and carpets ; 
until extravagance and luxury, despotism 
and indulgence, polygamy and, at last, 
polytheism should turn the city of David 
into the capital of an oriental debauchee, 
and the wise lad of the high choice of 
Gibeon into the tottering, worn-out, old 
man of fifty, to whom desire has failed and 
the grasshopper has become a burden. 

Is it not this worn-out, sated man of the 
world who is held up for us in the book of 
Ecclesiastes ? While on the one hand it 
is the epic of satiety, on the other hand 



The Lesson of Solomon's Decline* 43 

it breathes the spirit of the penitent who, 
ere it is too late, returns to God. The 
closing admonitions of the book : " Remem- 
ber now thy Creator in the days of thy 
youth ;" " Fear God, and keep his command- 
ments : for this is the whole duty of man ;" 
seem to indicate this. It is permitted us to 
hope that the old man recalled the young 
man's happiness in God, recovered the 
young man's faith, and closed his life in 
the sweet companionship of his earlier 
proverbs in which he has handed down to 
us the dependence of human wisdom on 
divine truth for its fructifying power. But 
whether we hope or despair for this once 
promising youth whose noonday splendor 
was so clouded over, the lesson of his life 
is an open book. Not in worldly magnif- 
icence but in humbleness of heart, not in 
indulgence but in self-denial, not in luxury 
but in the service of God, is happiness even 
in this world to be found. However great 
the gift of an understanding heart, of long 
life, riches and honor, there comes a time 
when their spell is broken, their power is 
gone, and man stands face to face with God 



44 At the Evening Hour, 

and eternity. Not the wisdom of this world, 
nor the beauty of art, nor the charm of 
literature, nor the genius of statesmanship, 
has a solution to the great question of im- 
mortality. Jesus Christ alone can open the 
door of the celestial country. Of all his 
promises none rises more naturally to the 
lips as we contemplate the broken life of the 
magnificent king than the sweetest of the 
beatitudes : 

" Blessed are the pure in heart : for they 
shall see God." 



The Longing of the Soul for GocL 



I USED to wonder in the lonely hours 
of quiet meditation what the psalmist 
meant when he said : 

" As the hart panteth after the water brooks, 
So panteth my soul after thee, O God." 

This was in my boyhood, in that indefinite 
time when the soul is alive and active, and 
the mind keen and receptive. Lying under 
the trees in the midsummer heats and look- 
ing up into the leafy boughs, my mind would 
recall the constant symbolism of the Bible 
for deep longing, the thirst of the soul, and 
it was a strange and unfamiliar conception. 
More, indeed, because the idea of the depth 
of longing itself was incomprehensible than 
because the symbol was unknown. 

It is not easy for men who dwell in the 
temperate regions to realize the parching 

45 



46 At the Evening Hour* 

thirst of the dry and arid tropic land. When 
the fierce midday heat of the desert is like 
the breath of a furnace, and the sun seems 
to stoop from the heavens, the intense desire 
for water to alleviate the untempered heat 
is without a parallel in the experience of 
northern peoples. But this was not the 
key to my early difficulty, nor does it seem 
to me to be the reason why so few are able 
to grasp the series of beautiful texts in which 
God is depicted as the object of the deepest 
and most tender longing. The knowledge 
of what is meant by " soul thirst " can only 
come when we have, at least, begun to feel 
the heat and burden of the day. This thirst 
may have many objects, but there is but one 
draught that can wholly quench it. Let us 
see a moment what these objects are. 

This is an age of material things. On 
every hand there are material pleasures, things 
which delight the eye, the ear, the taste and 
the mind. Man scarcely possesses a wish 
which cannot be gratified provided he has 
the one key. We are prone to lament that 
this one key is money. Is it right that we 
should? Surely not. Everything after its 



The Longing of the Soul for God, 47 

own kind. Material things should yield to 
material spells. If the spiritual gifts were 
to be found with locks fitted by the same 
key then truly we might cry out. But since 
the days of Simon Magus the purchase of 
spiritual gifts by material means has been 
unknown. Men have gone through the 
form. Indeed the Church of God has some- 
times seemed but a place of simoniacal ex- 
change. But they who paid the price went 
away unsatisfied. They carried away the 
symbol, but not the gift it symbolized. 

This soul thirst then must be for some- 
thing spiritual. The young man has a 
thousand fancies. They dance before his 
eyes, they lure his eager feet, they lead him 
— whither? Can this spiritual longing be 
evil ? Can it be like the longing of Faust 
for that which is forbidden? Is it some- 
times the thirst of an evil nature for the 
bread which satisfieth not, for the water 
which when drunken but makes the thirst 
tenfold more keen ? Is it sometimes only 
the lust of the eyes, and the lust of the flesh, 
and the pride of life? 

It is too true that it is. And we are wont 



48 At the Evening Hour. 

to think of the desire for these things as 
more powerful than the desire for good. 
We even appear to reckon the intensity of 
the soul thirst of man to be inversely as 
its nobility. 

I cannot accept this view. It is so easy 
to be cynical ; so easy to throw away assur- 
ance of God's love and take a pessimistic 
sorrow in its place; so easy to substitute 
the questionings of doubt for joy in the 
Holy Spirit. I love to dream that men are 
aspiring to the good as well as striving 
after the pleasant ; to dream that I may feel 
encouraged to do something to help on the 
work. 

What a glorious heritage is the record of 
God's schooling of his prophets ! What a 
splendid assurance for the heart which needs 
a lonely walk with God, to know that it was 
by such means that God prepared his most 
faithful ministers ! 

I have wondered what must have been 
the thoughts of Abraham as with the child 
of his hopes, the child of God's promises, 
he wearily, yet sturdily passed on even unto 
the third day, to the solitary heights of 



The Longing of the Soul for God. 49 

mount Moriah. I have felt when on some 
mountain top the singular sense of awe 
which must seize every heart upon the sum- 
mit of a commanding elevation. The sense 
of elevation of spirit is at times oppressive. 
Think how Abraham must have felt as he 
stood there face to face with God. What 
must have been the soul thirst which gave 
him courage to endure the torture of earthly 
longings apparently realized only to be for- 
ever robbed of their object ! 

Happily, we have preserved to us an exact 
record of one man's feelings after forty years 
in the desert, face to face with God. And 
in Joshua's declaration, " As for me and my 
house, we will serve the Lord," is summed 
up the story of that communion. It was 
worth more as a training in wisdom than all 
the learning of the Egyptians which he had 
left behind, just as Sherman's generalship 
was better than all the scientific rules of 
Jomini. They who follow the desert path- 
way may but break a dry crust at the water 
course; they who follow Egypt's wisdom 
have the flesh pots. Things change not 
even in these days. 

4 



5° At the Evening Hour. 

Meditation is the mood, of all others, least 
characteristic of the modern temper. The 
youngest understands how very necessary 
action is. " Be strong, quit you like men ; " 
" Gird up the loins of your mind ; " and all 
injunctions couched in similar terms meet 
with ready response in this age. It is more 
difficult to bring men to understand that the 
" race is not always to the swift, nor the 
battle to the strong ; " most difficult to impart 
the sweetness of a longing which can only 
be wholly satisfied beyond the valley of 
shadows but which on earth gains at least 
surcease of pain. 

It has one mark which is full of blessing. 
He who seeks to quench the world thirst 
rises up from the task weary and anxious 
only for repose. He who seeks to gratify 
the soul's deep longing comes from the seek- 
ing only eager to go forth into the world to 
aid others in the quest. 

It has seemed to me always as if in chang- 
ing the Legends of Arthur, Mr Tennyson 
might have changed with advantage . the 
quest of the Holy Grail into a more general 
triumph. The touch of monastic exclusive- 



The Longing of the Soul for God* 5 1 

ness, of ascetic self-love, still remains on 
the lovely story. The Spirit of Christ 
would more truly have led those who found 
the grail' to win for all the faithful a sight of 
it, and in so far a successful quest. It was 
perhaps impossible to retain the picturesque- 
ness of the legends without retaining the 
strange minglings of Christianity, supersti- 
tion and paganism. The truth of God is 
only simple and sublime ; human inventions 
are broken reflections, elusive, picturesque 
and fascinating. 

Is it not true that our lives are of this sort ? 
There is a pagan survival in much of our 
self-love. Even when the peaceful hour of 
meditation comes, we are apt to look within 
at self, instead of looking out on " the Lamb 
of God which taketh away the sin of the 
world," to pour out a libation to heathen 
gods rather than a prayer to the God of 
wisdom and of truth. 

Sometimes in the hour of a great bereave- 
ment, in the face of a great worldly loss, we 
stand face to face with a lost past, a vacant 
present, and a hopeless future, and our heart 
cries out for that which has been taken from 



52 At the Evening Hour. 

us. Such was David's position when he 
cried, " I am distressed for thee, my brother 
Jonathan : very pleasant hast thou been 
unto me ;" and when his own son perished 
in his wickedness, and he cried, "O my son 
Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would 
God I had died for thee." In such mo- 
ments men can at least gain some idea of 
how strong the longing of the soul for God 
should be ; how strong ? — yes, but a strength 
with no poignancy or pain. Happily, it was 
the same man who has left us the loveliest 
expressions of longing for God. " My soul 
thirsteth for God, for the living God," David 
exclaims, and when he was in the wilderness 
of Judah and the world was dark about him, 
he exclaimed again, " My soul thirsteth for 
thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and 
thirsty land, where no water is." 

Such thirst to those who have never felt 
it may seem but a dream ; to such as have 
learned from it to go and drink of the foun- 
tain of living waters, of the waters which are 
like a wellspring in the heart of those who 
drink, this thirst is the symbol of a spiritual 
communion sweet beyond all else. 



The Christian's "Cordon Bleu. 



" And they took knowledge of them, that they had been 
with Jesus." — Acts iv. 13. 

IN Athens in the days of Grecian great- 
ness it was better than a patent of nobil- 
ity to have been present on the glorious day 
when the tide of Persian invasion was 
stemmed upon the field of Marathon. It 
was the glory not merely of soldiers to 
have fought that day in the cause of free- 
dom, but also of statesmen and simple 
citizens. The poet ^Eschylus even held the 
part he played upon that day dearer than 
all his triumphs in the Agora. You know 
what it meant to have served in the Tenth 
Legion with Caesar in Gaul, and in the Old 
Guard with Napoleon at Marengo, Auster- 
litz and Wagram ; to have stood in the 
hollow square at Waterloo during the long 
hours when Bliicher was so anxiously 

53 



54 At the Evening Hour. 

awaited; what it is to have shared the 
fortune of those who, when the high tide 
of the Rebellion beat upon the heights of 
Gettysburg, helped to roll it back and to 
raise the nation once more upon a safe and 
sure foundation. Such services have ren- 
dered those who shared them a brother- 
hood ; a brotherhood bound by ties stronger 
and deeper than all the ties of intentional 
organization ; a brotherhood with a watch- 
word and a bond too sacred ever to be dis- 
solved, too famous ever to be forgotten. 
The very name graven upon their hearts, so 
entered into their lives as to become a spell 
to conjure with and to make every memory 
suggested by it an impulse for noble action. 
In the record which the Holy Spirit has 
preserved for us in the Gospels and in The 
Acts of the Apostles we have a narrative 
of a series of events not less important than 
those which led up to Marathon, Waterloo 
and Gettysburg. It is a simple story of the 
organization of a little brotherhood, com- 
posed of a few simple, unlearned, uninfluen- 
tial men, but destined to set in operation 
under the commands of their Lord a 



The Christian's " Cordon Bleu." 55 

movement which eventually shall con- 
quer the world. Their leader chose his 
companions with infinite wisdom and trained 
them with infinite skill. Neither the choice 
nor the training was according to the wis- 
dom of this world, but both have been 
amply justified, even by the history of this 
world, for more than eighteen centuries. 
The choice was singular: the men were 
neither rich nor powerful, but simple peas- 
ants, having no part in any of the rival 
parties, Egyptian, Syrian, Macedonian or 
Roman, which had battled for the possession 
of their native country, and trained in the 
traditions of godliness alone. And how un- 
worldly wise was this training. Neither in 
court nor in camp nor in schools of philoso- 
phy were they prepared for the conquest of 
the world. Yet, wandering here and there 
in the hill country of Judea and Galilee, 
beside the sunny waters of Gennesaret, or in 
the historic streets of Jerusalem, they formed 
the court of a greater than Augustus and 
studied in the school of a philosopher more 
divine than Plato. And when those years 
of preparation were over, what a wonderful 



56 At the Evening Hour. 

bond of union was wrought for them as, 
with fearful hearts and trembling limbs, they 
beheld the sacrifice of Calvary. 

There is nothing in the world to parallel 
it. To have shared in a great defeat never 
yet formed the bond of union for any 
company ; never yet in our world's history 
have the survivors of a great catastrophe 
met to celebrate that dark and dreadful 
hour. Men indeed have been loved and 
honored and reverently remembered who 
in splendid self-abnegation gave their lives 
for some great cause. What a spell the 
memory of the three hundred who died 
around their king at Thermopylae exercised 
over the Greek mind ! How tenderly were 
those who lay dead in that royal ring round 
the last English king at Senlac loved by 
generations of suffering Saxons ! What 
an agony of grief tore the heart of Scotland 
for the circle of slain upon Culloden's fatal 
field! What an inspiration and a spur to 
our own ancestors was the memory of the 
seven who first gave their lives for American 
liberty upon the green at Lexington ! But 
the influence of these scenes has depended 



The Christian's "Cordon Bleu/' 57 

upon other facts and circumstances. These 
beloved and dearly remembered patriots 
have been those who first shed their blood 
in a triumphing cause, or those who sealed 
with their blood a long and splendid story. 
It was far other with that little band who 
obscurely had grown to cherish the highest 
hopes ; hopes which not only compassed 
the great things of this world, but dared 
even to scale the heights of heaven. That 
little band had nothing but its hope and its 
faith to rest on ; and its hope, if not its 
faith, was crucified on Calvary. And then 
men scoffed at them, despised them ; the 
great treated them with contumely and 
contempt; the poor cast gibes and jeers 
at them ; even the little children pointed the 
finger of derision at them in the street. Yet 
they did not hide themselves from the pub- 
lic gaze, but went about, having been reas- 
sured by the reappearance of their Lord, 
having been confirmed by the gift of his 
Holy Spirit — they went about doing good. 
And two of them, the boldest and the most 
tender-hearted, finding a lame man sitting 
at the Beautiful gate of the temple, dared 



58 At the Evening Hour. 

to heal him by the spell of the despised 
name of Jesus. 

It was a bold thing to do. Jerusalem, like 
Alexandria, Rome, and the modern Paris, 
had the evil reputation of a city much given 
to violent riot and sedition. The populace, 
when raised to one of its frenzies of reli- 
gious fanaticism, was terrible, and Peter and 
John had witnessed this but too lately in the 
hideous cries with which the people had 
thronged about the Lord, crying out to the 
Roman governor, " Crucify him ! crucify 
him !" It was a bold thing to do, for they 
knew their peril, and well may they have 
trembled for their lives when " the peo- 
ple ran together unto them in the porch 
that is called Solomon's, greatly wondering." 
It was a question which would find a quick 
answer whether the people would want to 
stone them or want to bless them for the 
good deed which they had done. Then it 
was that that wonderful influence which 
Christian preachers have exercised from 
that day to this began to make itself felt; 
then it was that Peter quelled the people, 
denounced them for the wrong which they 



The Christian's "Cordon Bleu." 59 

had done, and called them to repentance. 
And the people hearkened unto them, so 
that the priests and the captain of the tem- 
ple and the Sadducees, always hostile to 
the Saviour, felt obliged to interpose, and 
they put Peter and John under arrest. 
When they brought them forth the next 
day to trial, these rulers thought that they 
could cow them with threats and overawe 
them by the exercise of authority. Yet 
they were amazed at their boldness and 
marveled that they were unlearned and 
ignorant ; and then it was that they " took 
knowledge of them, that they had been 
with Jesus." 

They took knowledge of them that they 
had been with Jesus ! Was it a thing which 
touched a chord of deep enthusiasm in the 
heart of these apostles ? Was it with a 
thrill of pride that they understood that 
wherever they went and whatever they did 
men would take knowledge of them, that 
they had been with Jesus? It was only 
a little before that Peter had denied with 
cursing that he had been with his Lord. 
In that hour of dark temptation even his 



60 At the Evening Hour. 

bold and loyal heart had faltered and failed. 
Was it now with the same craven spirit that 
he was conscious that men associated him 
with the crucified Nazarene ? Nay ; he had 
bitterly repented, and his risen Lord had 
forgiven him that sin of disloyalty and had 
confirmed him in his ministry, and hence- 
forth there was to be for him no doubt and 
no uncertainty. And that other one, that be- 
loved disciple, he who at that last sorrowful 
supper leaned his head on Jesus' bosom, 
think you it was with fear and dismay that 
he realized that these priests and rulers took 
knowledge of him, that he had been with 
Jesus ? Nay ; in that gentle yet zealous 
heart there were neither doubts nor fears — 
only the overwhelming certainty that he 
was his Lord's and his Lord was his. 

From that day to this with varying emo- 
tions men have taken knowledge of other 
men that they have been with Jesus. Some 
have eagerly desired this, so eagerly that 
they have made at every opportunity an 
outward display of the fact. The monk 
clothed himself in such a garb as to witness 
before all men of the service which he had 



The Christian's "Cordon Bleu." 61 

chosen. The crusader set the symbol of 
the cross upon shoulder, shield and battle- 
blade. Many others have sought by every 
kind of outward profession to declare unto 
all men that they have been with Jesus. 
Not all have done this because they desired 
merely to impress the eye with this saving 
truth. Many have been wholly loyal and 
wholly devoted who have conspicuously 
worn this outward symbol ; but others, not 
less loyal and not less devoted, have merely 
borne the symbol of the cross upon their 
hearts and lives, and in a quiet and simple, 
yet serene and certain way, allowed men to 
behold, even as Peter and John did, by the 
outward working of an inward faith, that 
they had been with Jesus. Surely if the 
heart is stamped with its precious symbol 
it will be impossible to conceal the fact. 
Men will and must read it in the life of him 
whose heart bears it, and it can be no 
reproach to such men that in their outward 
profession and outward garb they bear the 
testimony of their inward devotion. But 
nothing can be more despicable and more 
unworthy than to bear the cross of Christ, 



62 At the Evening Hour. 

which is no longer a symbol despised and 
hated, merely upon the outside, upon the 
clothes, as too many of those who were 
crusaders seem to have done. It is most 
important that every one who professes the 
sacred name of Jesus should carefully 
examine himself to know whether he 
wears that name graven upon his heart 
or merely embroidered upon his outward 
vesture. 

There is a striking scene in Cooper's 
" Last of the Mohicans " where the young 
captive chieftain, Uncas, is about to be taken 
to torture by his own kinsmen, the Delawares. 
He is taken from the prison tent and led to 
the stake, and there, his clothing being 
stripped off him, his fellow-tribesmen find 
upon his breast the totem of the royal 
house of their people, and at once recognize 
in him, instead of an enemy, a rightful ruler, 
and promptly yield to him the recognition 
which belonged to his birth. 

So may it be with those who belong to 
the royal household of faith that when their 
own righteousness, which the prophet says 
is but filthy rags, is stripped away from them, 



The Christian's " Cordon Bleu/' 63 

their real character may be found stamped 
upon their lives — the simple yet sublime 
evidence of Christian faith. Then it will be 
that men will take knowledge of them, that 
they have been with Jesus. Then it will be 
that they will receive the promised reward 
of those who have been faithful over a few 
things. 

Have we a proper realization of how 
important it is, we being Christians, that 
men shall take knowledge of us that we 
have been with Jesus ? Such witness-bear- 
ing is not merely an inevitable result of such 
companionship, but a precious privilege as 
well. It is not necessary to hang upon our 
breasts a service medal such as the soldiers 
of imperial France so proudly wore, such 
as you will find upon the breast of every 
battle-scarred veteran in Europe to-day, tell- 
ing how he fought at Sedan or Gravelotte, 
how he rode with Scarlett and his gallant 
six hundred in the Crimea, or faced the 
fearful Arab charge at Tel-el-Kebir. But 
it is necessary that by loyalty to truth, con- 
stancy in temptation, and gentleness of life 
we shall let all men see and know that we 



64 At the Evening Hour. 

have been with Jesus, and from him have 
learned the secret of a godly life. 

Let no man rob you of your right. It is 
the most glorious and most honorable dis- 
tinction that can be awarded by man : that 
men shall take knowledge of you, that you 
have been with Jesus. 



The Beauty of Boyhood. 



And the child Samuel grew on, and was in favor both 
with the Lord, and also with men. — I Samuel ii. 26. 

And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in 
favor with God and man. — St. Luke ii. 52. 

THESE two verses introduce to us two of 
the most beautiful boyhoods of which 
we have any account, two boyhoods which 
were the flower of fruitful manhoods : the 
one that of a mere man, the other that of 
our Lord and Saviour. Both were children 
of promise ; indeed in one culminated all the 
promises which God has made to his people, 
and all their hopes both for this world and 
that which is to come ; and yet the language 
which is used to describe the growth and 
development of the two boys is strikingly 
similar — especially the latter clause in each 
instance, which declares of one that he was 
in favor with the Lord and also with men, 

5 65 



66 At the Evening Hour. 

and of the other that he increased in favor 
with God and man. 

There is perhaps too much said to-day 
which indirectly leads us to conclude that 
that which is in favor with man cannot 
please God. Of course, this may be ap- 
proximately true when individual cases of 
the special gratification of mere human 
desires are chosen as illustrations; but the 
tendency is to change the statement, per- 
haps unconsciously, and have us conclude 
that that which is in favor with God does not 
please men. But these statements are not 
convertible, and I think that no statement of 
so sweeping a character is truer than that 
which declares that whatsoever things are 
pleasing to God are pleasing to men, for, how- 
ever much man may have followed after the 
devices of his own heart, he has not lost the 
power to rejoice in the beauty and glory 
which God has shed abroad in the world, 
nor the capacity to perceive the nobility in 
those virtues which are especially pleasing 
to God. Men not only admire and love 
those who are seekers after God, but no 
man is so sure to win eventual favor with 



The Beauty of Boyhood. 67 

man as is that man who unswervingly, un- 
faltering and unceasingly puts the favor of 
God above the favor of man. 

Hence, when the apostle tells us to be all 
things to all men, we must not jump to the 
conclusion that he is advising us to cultivate 
the arts of deception and chicane, however 
characteristic they may be of the self-seeker 
and the politician ; but observe that he is 
recommending to our notice that the perfect 
man in Christ Jesus, the man who is in favor 
with God, the man who is gentle, and cour- 
teous, and manly, will possess those qualities 
which will make him all things to all men, 
and that if he has not learned how to make 
the applied teaching of his Master attractive 
to men, the flower of his Christian manhood 
has been blighted ere it bloomed. 

There is an implied statement here, that 
by their fruits men shall recognize the 
growth of Christian virtues ; an implied 
statement that appearance is a concomitant 
of being; that a man cannot be what he 
should be without appearing to be such. We 
are inclined sometimes to overvalue appear- 
ances, but not less often to underrate them, 



68 At the Evening Hour. 

and to think a proper effort to appear to be 
what we are seeking to be, pretentious — the 
aping of a virtue which we do not possess, 
and an ignoble effort to cheat others by a 
specious but false behavior. Hence the 
Pharisee is constantly held before our eyes 
— the man who allowed the gracious spirit 
of prayer and praise to become a mere form, 
and from a mere form something worse, the 
dead image of a virtue which he had ceased 
to possess, and then a mask to conceal the 
vice which had usurped its place ; so that 
out of the man of pious practices came the 
man of pious pretenses, and, finally, the man 
of pious fraud. Such is the evolution of the 
hypocrite from the just man through the 
Pharisee. Our Lord's unsparing condem- 
nation of this class, and its just application 
to charlatanry in many a succeeding genera- 
tion, are so well known that they are oft- 
quoted in condemnation of many things 
which are decorous and in themselves fit and 
even beautiful. If we are told to avoid the 
appearance of evil, we are not less told 
in a hundred places under many different 
forms and symbols to strive after the most 



The Beauty of Boyhood* 69 

attractive behavior, in order both that we 
may not be a scandal to our "Lord and that 
we may win others to Christ. 

From a national point of view we have 
for a hundred years been passing through a 
period first of revolution and then of reap- 
ing of the fruits of revolution — indeed in 
some things our revolt dates back to a much- 
earlier period, to the period of the Reforma- 
tion and the Puritan revolution ; and in 
many things a certain line of conduct was 
assumed as a right and proper and very 
necessary protest against certain beautiful 
forms which sin had entered into and made 
its own ; in process of time these protests 
assumed the hard and unlovely forms either 
of Pharisaism itself, or of a still less admir- 
able neglect of all proper adorning of our con- 
duct. The result has been that often while 
we have recognized our duties, we have for- 
gotten that there were privileges connected 
with them, and in urging these duties upon 
others we have ceased to recommend them 
by exhibiting the accompanying privileges. 
I wish that every young man could feel 
that it is not merely his duty to be a man, 



7° At the Evening Hour* 

but his privilege to be a gentleman ; that it 
is not merely his duty to become a Christian, 
but his privilege to be in favor both with God 
and man ; that it is not merely his duty to pos- 
sess all the Christian virtues, but his privi- 
lege to exhibit them in his life. We 
have a few remarkable examples in secu- 
lar history of men who have left behind 
them memories quite incommensurate with 
anything which they actually accomplished 
in the world ; men who performed no great 
works either of arm or of brain ; men 
who did not occupy positions of distin- 
guished eminence ; but whose lives were 
informed with a singular beauty of spirit 
until they were transformed by its influence 
and shone in the world as beings almost 
distinct from its common inhabitants. One 
of these was that brilliant Scotch scholar, 
James Crichton, who came to be known not 
merely throughout the world of his day, but 
to posterity, as the " Admirable Crichton." 
This young man, graduating with distin- 
guished honor in the University of St. 
Andrews when only fifteen years of age, 
passed with singular brilliancy through the 



The Beauty of Boyhood, 71 

courts of Europe, vying with the most learned 
in the discussion of learned subjects, with 
the most skillful in the performance of bodily 
feats, and with the most pious in the exer- 
cise of an exalted spirit of worship. Passing, 
just at the attainment of his majority, to 
Italy, he was received enthusiastically by 
Aldus Manutius, the great publisher, and 
introduced to Venice and the world in 
a glowing dedication to his edition of one 
of Cicero's works. From this most curi- 
ous and certainly authentic document we 
learn that Crichton was publicly introduced 
to the Doge and Senate, to whom he de- 
livered a brilliant discourse, and afterwards 
engaged in a public disputation on theology, 
philosophy and mathematics before a large 
concourse of learned men. Passing from 
city to city, he engaged in similar disputa- 
tions, sometimes of three days' duration, in 
which he made proof of his claim to univer- 
sal knowledge. It has been suggested by 
some who did not know him that he must 
have had something of the coxcomb about 
him, but the testimony of his contempora- 
ries pointedly contradicts this suggestion, 



72 At the Evening Hour. 

all of them uniting in the declaration that 
there was a charm in his manner which de- 
lighted every impartial hearer. But his 
career was to be as brief as it was beautiful. 
He became the tutor of the son of the Duke 
of Mantua, afterwards the patron of the poet 
Tasso, a young man of marked ability but 
of violent passion. This young Gonzaga, 
while engaged in a brawl with other young 
noblemen, attacked Crichton on the streets 
of Mantua. Being in disguise, he was not 
recognized by the gallant Crichton, who 
-dispersed the party and overthrew the 
prince. When he discovered who he was, 
though he had disarmed him in self-defense, 
lie expressed his regret and presented his 
sword to his prince, who in a dastardly 
manner revenged himself by running it 
through his body. Thus perished this 
youthful paragon at the age of twenty-two 
years, leaving behind him one of the most 
remarkable reputations of the Middle Ages. 
Little less remarkable than the career 
of Crichton was that of the poet Sydney, 
who, whatever may be said of him as a 
poet, was quite as much a philosopher, a 



The Beauty of Boyhood. 73 

soldier and a courtier — a man in whom 
all talents and all virtues seemed so to 
meet that all who knew him were trans- 
ported with admiration, and all who have 
come after him have wondered that so 
great a reputation could be supported by 
such slender remains. But one of his biog- 
raphers has summed up the reasons for his 
renown by saying of him that in him there 
was " the essence of congruity ; " that it was 
not the greatness of any talent, but the fact that 
many talents were in him united in such just 
proportion, which caused him to appear the 
most perfect gentleman of his age. As in 
the case of Crichton, an early and gallant 
death, which seemed rather an unneces- 
sary sacrifice than a worthy termination of a 
promising career, mingled a keener regret 
than would otherwise have attended even so 
great a loss. 

Such men as these witness to the possi- 
bility of the perfect possession of the Chris- 
tian graces. Hence it becomes us all, even 
in the least things, to seek to possess them. 
I sometimes wonder what a different face 
our world would wear if every man would 



74 At the Evening Hour. 

seek not merely to do what it is his duty to 
do, but to do all that it is his privilege to do. 
How much more decorous and how much 
more charming and attractive would be the 
appearance of our youth. I would not have 
this thought confounded with the idea of 
making things finical or of taking out of our 
daily life those virtues which undoubtedly 
reside in a rough-hewn manhood; nor 
would I have anyone believe that frugality 
is inconsistent with the highest beauty. But 
if all could feel that the chapel, for instance, 
was indeed the house of God, and if our 
thoughts when in it could be wholly lifted 
up to him ; if light conversation and light 
thoughts even, not merely during, but be- 
fore and after service, could be dispensed 
with, how much more truly would it be to 
us the house of God. If only every man 
could feel that if he has a weak body it is 
peculiarly necessary that he should make it 
strong that his mind may not outgo the 
development of his . frame ; if he has a 
strong body he should be doubly zealous in 
the class room lest the over-development 
of his muscles make him dull and slow of 



The Beauty of Boyhood, 75 

mind. If only in the class room, if every- 
one could feel that he and his instructor are 
fellow-workers in the great cause of educa- 
tion and that the instructor is only there to 
help him in the prosecution of his plans ; 
and if in and through all of these various 
theaters of action, as in the great trilogies 
of the Greeks, there was being worked out 
the story of one destiny, great and dominant 
— the destiny of each human soul engaged 
upon the scene, but so much more impor- 
tant than each human soul, because the 
destiny of the whole race ; that the progress 
of the play may not be stopped a moment 
on behalf of any man, but every man must 
eagerly press on lest he should lose his 
part in the final consummation of the whole. 
Let us give ourselves a little to the study 
of what our privileges are ; not that we may 
wring them from others, but that we may 
render them to ourselves. And let us seek 
to crown our lives not merely with the hon- 
orable rewards of athletic contest and the 
more honorable distinctions of academic 
effort, but with the crowning and most beauti- 
ful of graces which is the reward of seeking 



76 At the Evening Hour. 

after Christ. So that as we grow it may be 
said of us not that we are unprofitable serv- 
ants, for we have done only what it was our 
duty to do, but that we increased in favor 
with God and man. 



True Manhood. 



Watch ye, ... . quit you like men, be strong. — I Cor. 
xvi. 13. 

THERE is a spell in the word man. No 
leader has ever conjured in vain when 
he has appealed to men by their manhood. 
What strong evidence of this is written in 
human language; in the tribes and people 
who delight to call themselves " Men," or 
" The Men," while giving to other peoples 
titles of less honorable significance. The 
conception of a man, the standard of man- 
hood, has been subject to great variation. 
Yet the idea has admitted of but one rival. 
The other idea is that of God. A Godlike 
man is a conception higher than a manly 
man. Toward such a conception the best 
men have striven ; while decadent people 
have over and over again dragged down 
their idea of what was Godlike, till it became 

77 



78 At the Evening Hour. 

only what was manlike. It is the happy- 
fortune of the Christian standard that the 
manly and the Godlike have met together 
in perfect unity in the person of our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. In him alone 
we see at once man and God. In him we 
see the possibility of Godlike manhood and 
the standard for the utmost striving of 
aspiring humanity. 

In seeking for a standard of manhood it 
is perhaps worth our while to consider what 
the word means, has meant, and may be 
brought to mean. You remember how 
Diogenes, the cynic, went about the streets 
with a lantern at midday searching for a 
man. Not even Alexander the Great with 
all his genius and power satisfied the stand- 
ard of his philosophy. The great con- 
queror standing between him and the sun 
shut off its light from him. Not content 
to bask in the sunlight of that great warrior's 
presence, Diogenes' one request was that 
Alexander should stand aside and let the 
light from heaven reach him. So many 
another hero has stood between men and the 
light from heaven, obscuring the true light 



True Manhood* 79 

and lowering the standard of what was high 
and good. 

Perhaps it is no fancy of the scientist that 
the life of the individual repeats the history 
of the race ; that we may read in the history 
of men the history of humanity, written 
small. If so, we may find the story of ages 
mirrored in the aspiration of the child, and. 
alas ! too often we find cases of arrested 
development where the child never comes 
to be a man full-grown. What are the 
aspirations, the manly standards toward 
which children reach forward? The boy 
begins by desiring to be the driver of a 
horse car, a circus rider, a soldier, a politician, 
a successful man of business. He may, and 
generally does, grow on beyond that, and 
desires to be a benefactor of his race in one 
or another of the noble professions. He 
may even hear the call of God to his minis- 
try and eagerly reply, " Here am I, Lord ; 
send me." We read in history stages which 
correspond to all of these periods of boy- 
ish aspiration. In all early history we have 
at least a reminiscence of the time when 
men found their manhood most put to the 



So At the Evening Hour. 

test in hunting or the domestication of 
animals, of a time when men thought war 
the highest employment for their various 
capacities, of a time when politics, statecraft 
and diplomacy was each the chief occupa- 
tion of the choicest intellects. But few 
pushed beyond the standards of their times 
to prove that self-assertion in all its forms of 
force and fraud, violence and trickery, was 
not the highest occupation for the noblest 
men. 

Through all this there is a failure to dis- 
criminate the different senses in which such 
words as strength, intelligence, wisdom can 
be used. Perhaps strength has been more 
worshiped than any other attribute of man- 
hood — more worshiped and more indis- 
criminately worshiped. The great con- 
queror is still the man who catches the 
imagination of the people. The great con- 
queror is still the man who, when greatness 
is mentioned, receives the first tribute. If 
I were to ask a company of students 
who were the greatest men the world has 
produced, they would probably mention 
at once a series of names of generals, 



True Manhood. 8 1 

and kings, and emperors. The empire of 
the arm would take precedence of the 
empire of the mind. Homer, Plato, Dante, 
and Shakespeare would find but a secondary 
recognition. The grandeur of soul would 
even longer be delayed its better deserved 
tribute, and David, Paul, Augustine, Gregory, 
Luther, Calvin, and Wesley would receive 
only a grudging recognition after their 
claims were fairly presented. 

Yet what are these mighty conquerors 
but perverters of their strength. A recent 
picture by a great artist has portrayed with 
dramatic power the influence of their lives. 
Upon a broad canvas he has drawn a desert 
wide and waste. Down the middle fore- 
ground, winding far away beyond the meas- 
ure of the strongest eye, moves a long com- 
pany splendid with all the panoply of war. 
At its head is Caesar; Alexander drives 
his war chariot on the one hand and Sesos- 
tris his upon the other, while by their side 
ride Napoleon and the great Tartar con- 
queror Tamerlane, and behind them we rec- 
ognize one and another of the cruel children 
of warlike genius, Charlemagne, Attila, and 



&2 At the Evening Hour. 

many others whose names have been written 
with blood in the story of the world. They 
ride with bloodless faces, neither living, nor 
yet dead, through long lines of the victims 
of their rapacity, groups of dead who were 
once living, but had been slain for them, not 
one who being dead they had made alive 
again. It is a powerful picture, and its 
history is as true as it is striking — a story 
of multitudes dead for the pleasure of single 
men. 

Turn from that picture to another — to the 
picture painted so often by far greater artists, 
painted upon the pages of the Bible by the* 
pen of the Spirit, painted upon the heart of 
every lover of his Lord, the picture of the 
accursed tree on Calvary and its dying agony 
of the Son of man, the very God and very 
man. He it is who gave his life for many. 
Over against that picture of sorrow there 
is no despair. No graves tenanted by thou- 
sands are to be found as a consequence of 
that mighty sacrifice. Only a new-made 
sepulcher, empty from the third day ; only 
millions of spiritually dead who by that 
sacrifice have been made alive, and from 



True Manhood. 83 

whom rise one triumphal paean : " O death, 
where is thy sting? O grave, where is 
thy victory ? . . . Thanks be to God, which 
giveth us the victory through our Lord 
Jesus Christ." 

St. Paul says of himself: "When I was 
a child, I spake as a child, I understood as 
a child, I thought as a child : but when 
I became a man, I put away childish things." 
Does it not become us all to put aside child- 
ish things and take thought how we shall 
attain to a true estimate of manhood, a true 
ideal toward which we may seek to grow ? 
The injunction of St. Paul as given to us in 
this passage not only bids us " quit ourselves 
like men," but it adds two other injunctions, 
"Watch," and "be strong." As youth is 
beautiful, so is strength ; not brute strength, 
but a strength which watches and takes 
thought how it shall exert itself; a strength 
which knows that it is sometimes better to 
endure and to suffer wrong than to exert 
itself and do evil. There are some honored 
heroes who have well illustrated what true 
manhood is. In the dawn of English his- 
tory there was Alfred the Great who in toil 



84 At the Evening Hour. 

and perplexity, robbed of every mark of 
kingship except his kingly nature, wandered 
hither and thither in the land, proving his 
right to rule by his capacity to endure and 
suffer hardship, and at last brought vic- 
tory out of defeat, a nation out of a 
scattered remnant, a statute book out of 
anarchy, a true religion out of the grasp 
of heathenism. 

There was our own Washington, the man 
who never won a single pitched battle 
worthy of a great general and who yet 
proved himself through seven long years 
of disaster and suffering and ceaseless strug- 
gle worthy to be named by Frederick the 
Great as the greatest general in the world. 
Were you to ask any wise historian where 
Washington proved his greatness, he would 
not tell you at Trenton on that midwinter 
morning, nor at Yorktown on that last fair 
field of fortune, but beside the feeble fires 
and amid the blood tracks of Valley Forge. 
It was strength to endure, strength to suffer 
hardship, strength to bring victory out of 
defeat; not rash, ruthless, riotous courage, 
but chastened constancy and faithful forti- 



True Manhood. 85 

tude, which he gave as a deathless memory 
to our land. 

These are the proper exemplars of our 
ideal of manhood. They stand, of course, 
as all exemplars must, on a somewhat higher 
plane than we. Emerson, however, was not 
far afield when he bade man hitch his 
wagon to a star. By that he meant to 
teach the lesson that the young man of 
low ideals is hopelessly astray. A man 
must set a high standard for his own per- 
formance, a standard which he may and 
should hope to attain, even though he does 
not expect to attain it. In following such 
noble ideals many have unconsciously far 
surpassed anything which they even hoped 
for. There is many a quiet life of self- 
denial, self-sacrifice, and self-abasement un- 
consciously lived in the full glory of great- 
ness; sometimes unnoted by the world, 
sometimes discovered too late to be honored 
here below, but always known and recog- 
nized by the great Rewarder whose delight 
it is to honor goodness rather than great- 
ness, loyalty rather than success. 

What is the secret of this manhood ? It 



86 At the Evening Hour. 

is simple, easily understood, easily secured. 
It is reliance not upon self, but upon One 
who is able to save unto the uttermost all 
who come unto God by him ; who is able 
to save from self and from sin ; not from 
sins of commission only, but from sins of 
omission as well ; who is able to save us 
from self and from sin not in the far-off 
future, but to-day. The Bible is full of the 
lives of such men so saved. History has 
their names upon every page; you know 
them in familiar life. Seek to understand 
the secret of their manhood and with God's 
help to be like them. We have in the 
thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians the 
constitution of such a life. Its basis must 
be Christian love. Its assertion must be 
therefore lovely. Now and again even 
among the records of royalty we find an 
oasis, where, instead of reading the name 
of Charles the Great, or William the Con- 
queror, or Peter the Cruel, we read the name 
of the Good, and we rejoice in the story of 
a man in high place who was able so to 
benefit his people and bless his land as to 
win such a title. So in private life it is the 



True Manhood. 87 

man who is lovely and of good report, the 
man who has learned how to bear all things, 
to endure all things, and who knows that it 
requires not merely strength, but the strength 
of the Spirit, in order to bear and endure. 
Of course, it would be easy to be manly if 
we were always praised, but is it not also 
desirable that we should be manly even 
when it is hard to be, even when jeered at 
because of our manliness ? It is a very bad 
principle that sometimes creeps into young 
manhood that every injury must at once be 
visited with retaliation. If one boy strikes 
another he must strike back, forgetful that 
" a soft answer turneth away wrath," and 
that an unprovoked blow which is not re- 
turned mav be the means of making a friend 
forever, when if returned it would lead to 
an unending enmity. Every shrewd com- 
petitor knows that if you wish to weaken 
the skill of another in an athletic contest, 
the surest way to do it is to destroy his self- 
control by provoking him to anger. The 
man who loses his temper in the rush line 
is likely to lose the game. The man who 
loses his self-control in society is sure to 



88 At the Evening Hour. 

lose his manhood. Gentle, easy to be en- 
treated, rendering not evil for evil, enduring 
as seeing him that is invisible, seeking to be 
like Christ — these are the marks of a true 
Christian manhood. Out of such qualities 
come men, gentlemen, Christians. Out of 
such manly, gentlemanly, Christian men 
have come the best things of our civilization. 
In them is the hope and the assurance of the 
future. 



Responsibility* 



Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much 
required. — Luke xii. 48. 

IT is hard to distinguish between what is 
good and what is evil in ambition ; hard 
to define the difference in practice between 
aspiration and self-seeking ; hard to draw a 
just line between self-conceit and self-confid- 
ence. Yet only at our peril may we neglect 
to draw this line and make this distinction. 

Not merely must we do this subjectively 
for ourselves, but also objectively in our 
judgment of others, for the estimates which 
we form of others will mold us, and the 
ideals which we consecrate will lift us up or 
pull us down. 

You remember how the sons of Zebedee 
came to Jesus seeking the impossible gift of 
being on his right and left hand in his king- 
dom, and how Christ reproved their un- 

89 



9° At the Evening Hour. 

hallowed ambition. Yet both of these men 
were chosen to behold the Lord's trans- 
figuration, and while one was the first of the 
apostles to wear the glorious crown of 
martyrdom, the other, John, received the 
more than kingly title of the beloved dis- 
ciple, and to him it was given to lean upon 
the Lord's bosom at that last supper on 
earth, and to him after a long and tedious, but 
noble and useful service, was granted the 
glorious revelation of our ascended Lord. 
How empty was the desire for mere place 
— though that were the most exalted in 
heaven — compared with such careers. But 
we must not forget that the place they 
craved was not in the heavenly kingdom, but 
in that earthly kingdom which in their dark- 
ened minds they expected Messias to found 
on earth. Not the counselors of an earthly 
king was to be their fate, but the ambas- 
sadors of the King of kings. God over- 
ruled their folly and gave them better re- 
ward. 

God gave them a great commission. 
They for a time were blind to the real pur- 
pose of it ; they knew the greatness of their 



Responsibility, 9 1 

gift, but did not carefully consider the true 
use to which it should be put. 

All human greatness is an elusive thing. 
Ask any well-read man who are the great 
men of the ages, and he will rattle off a list 
of names without very carefully distinguish- 
ing between them and the grounds of their 
claim — Alexander the Great, Socrates or 
Plato, Caesar, Charlemagne, etc., etc. Per- 
haps in his mind Alexander is only the 
great fighter of battles, or he may be also 
the founder of Alexandria and director of 
the economic movements of the centuries. 
But if we look at his career through the 
clarified vision of eyes which have been 
made to see the hand of God in history, we 
shall see that Alexander was the instrument 
used to prepare the world, by giving it a 
single literary language, for the coming of 
Christ. So the sword of Caesar and the 
policy of Augustus united to create an 
empire as wide as the empire of Alexander's 
tongue, and the genius of Socrates and Plato 
joined to uplift the thought of Greek philos- 
ophy to the nearest approach to Christian 
truth. In the fullness of times Christ came to a 



9 2 At the Evening Hour. 

half-dead world hungering and thirsting for 
the truth which was able to make alive unto 
salvation. And these proud spirits were 
used of God for his eternal purpose. Think 
you that Alexander would have rejoiced to 
know that the residuum of his splendid con- 
quests and clear-headed statecraft would be 
the preparation of the world for a more 
potent conqueror who was to come out of 
Judea ? or that Athenian philosophy in the 
person of the divine Plato would have 
readily yielded its consummation to the 
same source ? or that Caesar or Augustus 
would have brooked the thought that Rome 
was to be but the handmaid of Jerusalem ? 
To these men God gave much, at their 
hands he demanded much ; but they were 
but blind instruments. We look at them 
critically and we think them great — as they 
were, yet but little more admirable than 
the Nile which in its unintelligent overflow 
makes Egypt a garden, or than the winter 
frost which pulverizes the rocks and makes 
of their hardness productive soil. They 
were great ; great as philosophers, statesmen, 
soldiers ; great of mind, of tongue, of arm. 



Responsibility. 93 

But not often great men ; great of soul, great 
in a splendid synthesis in which mind and 
tongue and hand served a soul that was 
taught of God. 

There is no lack of men to set over 
against these heroes of heathendom. Men 
who wear the glamor of this world's great- 
ness, men able to dazzle our imaginations as 
well as to appeal to our consciences. The 
Bible is full of its heroes : Joseph, the prime 
minister ; Moses, the law-giver ; David, the 
king. While in the New Testament, Paul, 
the apostle, for by that title he loved best 
to be called, might with equal propriety be 
called Paul, the orator, the philosopher, the 
missionary, the traveler. These are but 
the first fruits of the Christian centuries 
which are full of the greatness of the eter- 
nal word speaking through men. 

But these men have been what they have 
been in every case because they had a con- 
sciousness of the duty laid upon them. 

Moses rushed too early into the work — 
half prepared, as so many young men want to 
rush into God's service to-day — and then 
when his time had fully come he held back. 



94 At the Evening Hour, 

God required of him the splendid service 
which his native talents and his high training 
in all the learning of Egypt fitted him to 
render. Alas for his hesitation when God's 
time had come. The faltering tongue was 
his through life, and Aaron was given to 
him — half interpreter, half a millstone round 
his neck. 

Saul held back; consented to the death 
of the noble Stephen, first of Christian 
martyrs ; but God needed him, needed his 
natural gifts, needed his thorough training in 
the rabbinical schools which the other 
apostles lacked, and so God called him — 
called him with a voice not wanting in au- 
thority as he went on the way to Damascus. 
But he carried with him "a thorn in his 
flesh," some bodily infirmity, which some 
have thought the effect of that light which 
shone round about him, and that shock 
which fell upon his vision, by the way. If 
so, it is another warning not to delay the 
consecration of our gifts. God may save us, 
but as by fire. God may use us, but not as 
if we gladly set ourselves aside for his 
service. 



Responsibility, 95 

" Unto whomsoever much is given." Surely- 
much has been given unto us. Ours is the 
heritage of the ages. We are entered into 
the inheritance of every land and people ; we, 
unto whom the ends of the earth are come. 
No people were ever so free ; free not only 
in body, not only from taskmasters, from 
governmental restraints, but free in mind, 
free from the bondage of fear, free from the 
shackles of superstition, from the darkness 
of ignorance. The world lies before us as a 
theater where we may play our parts ; 
heaven lies open before us as the goal of our 
desires. No barrier of tradition, or rank, or 
money blocks our way from the recognition 
and applause of men ; no forms or priest- 
craft shut us from God or his revealed word. 
All these things are ours ; but for our use we 
must render a strict account. 

It will not do for us to say that this or 
that service is too high for us and we will 
not assume its responsibilities. The call is 
upon us, and we must heed it or prove rec- 
reant to the trust committed to us. Here 
the treasures of learning are laid open. No 
man who comes hither has a right to neglect 



96 At the Evening Hour. 

his present opportunity. It is not his to take 
or leave, but his to take. This college was 
founded by men with a purpose for men 
with a purpose. They gave it the name 
of a man whose long and beautiful life was 
animated and ennobled by a purpose, and 
its whole history is that of the triumph of 
purposeful men through its training. 

It recognizes and proclaims, moreover, 
that man has a higher destiny than mere 
human ends, and that there is a higher 
wisdom than man's wisdom — even the hid- 
den wisdom of God. Along with each 
week's work provision is made for the con- 
secration and instruction of all in this wis- 
dom, and the effort to make all understand 
that they should personally feel their re- 
sponsibility to God is a strenuous one. We 
would that every one might feel that he 
could reverently declare: 

" A charge to keep I have, 
A God to glorify; 
A never-dying soul to save 
And fit it for the sky." 

This and more than this ! He who has 
•least has this much, though often the one 



Responsibility. 97 

talent of a salvable sdul is wrapped in a 
napkin and buried in the earth. You to 
whom so much is given must help save 
others ; your fellows in your classes, your 
friends wherever they may be. You must 
when you go into the world help save it; 
save it from itself, from its ignorance and 
vice, save it from the devil, who is as shrewd 
and as worldly-wise as ever. Surely the 
mediaeval painters were wrong to paint the 
devil as they did, with hoof and horns and 
forked tail. He comes to men with soft hand 
and alluring speech ; his eyes are often bright 
with intelligence and his manners charming 
with the quintessence of etiquette ; he sings 
the songs most in vogue and dances the latest 
steps ; he is conversant with the freshest 
fashions of the stage and the surest com- 
binations of the gambling houses ; in all 
things he is genial, jovial, and genteel. It is 
not till you are under his power, till he is 
sure of his victim, that it becomes apparent 
that the wages of sin is death, and that what 
seemed so honey-sweet appeared so only 
because the devil is the father of lies. 
Do not think you can avoid meeting him ; 

7 



9 8 At the Evening Hour, 

nay, seek him out and drive him from you 
by the sign of the cross ; the sign of the 
cross not made upon the empty air, but 
printed on your heart and impressed upon 
your life. You to whom so much is given 
must save the world from Satan, must save 
the world for Christ. 

What has been given you in love will be 
required of you with justness. Don't under- 
estimate the justness of God, nor begin to 
calculate beforehand how much mercy you 
can obtain for Christ's dear sake. It will be 
required in loving tenderness, but you need 
no strength other than that which is ready 
to your hands. As your day, so shall your 
strength be, is the promise. If in the 
struggle you grow faint and sink upon your 
knees, you shall be no worse off. The devil 
never yet overcame a Christian on his knees. 
Beware lest he catch you weakly on your 
back. 



College Life and College Learning* 



THERE are few things so vague as the 
ideas of college life held by those who 
are not themselves college bred. They range 
through the whole gamut of human fancy. 
Some imagine a college to be like the gar- 
dens of the Hesperides, and think the fruits 
of knowledge are as easily gathered as their 
golden apples ; others compare it with the 
" fountain of idleness," with the golden glow 
of Turner's canvas before their minds, its 
life pleasant but profitless ; yet others regard 
it as the lingering abode of scholasticism, ef- 
fortless and effete, the nursing mother of 
vice and vanity, where athletics alone com- 
mand activity, and dissipation only keeps 
the midnight lamp alight ; few seem to know 
it as it really is, the home 

" Of toil unsevered from tranquillity : 
Of labor, that in lasting fruits outgrows 

99 



ioo At the Evening Hour* 

Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose, 
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry." 

And even those who see its higher and labo- 
rious side, sometimes forget that life, not 
learning, makes a college what it is. 

The actual college life is neither what the 
fancy of the outside world paints it, nor what 
the eager freshman hopes it, nor what the 
toiling teacher strives to make it. Like all 
human affairs it is the resultant of many 
forces, and varies from time to time with 
the ebb and flow of the tide of truth, up- 
rightness, and devotion in the life of the peo- 
ple. It is safe to say that at no time is col- 
lege life in exact proportion ethically, intel-, 
lectually, or socially to the amount of learn- 
ing in the college. College life and college 
learning are, therefore, not only not synony- 
mous, but they do not even approximately 
denote or connote the same thing. College 
life is generic, it includes the whole cir- 
cumstances of existence within the college 
community and is more often accurately ex- 
hibited by the undergraduate body than by 
the faculty. College learning is not only 
specific, it is in the highest degree particu- 



College Life and College Learning. 101 

lar, is most often determined by the faculty, 
even when learning is only in a moderate 
measure imparted to the students. Some- 
times it depends upon the vigor and vitality 
and intellectual energy, not only of a few, 
but even of a single member of the teaching 
force. Garfield's famous saying that Dr. 
Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a boy 
at the other was all that was needed to con- 
stitute a college, has found historical ex- 
emplification in many cases where a man 
has not merely made an institution, but 
blazed forth from the oppressive gloom of 
corporate darkness. Plato was the Acad- 
emy, Zeno the Portico, and Aristotle the 
Lyceum, by the free fashioning of their genius. 
But when John Wycliffe shone out in Oxford, 
and Irnerius at Bologna, and Abelard at 
Paris, they found the more difficult task of 
overcoming the inertia of an all-pervading 
darkness. 

College life owes its origin to monastic in- 
fluences, and it retains some mark of its 
source to this day. To this it owes its retire- 
ment, its repose, its calm and broad esti- 
mate of men and things. Not less to this it 



102 At the Evening Hour. 

owes its tendency to prefer thought to ac- 
tion ; to delay when promptitude is essential 
to success ; to value discretion above courage. 
In these things it takes its color chiefly from 
the permanent element, the teaching force. 
On the other hand, it receives annually great 
reinforcements of crude, rash, headstrong 
and impatient natures, which it slowly 
transforms, as well as informs, and sends 
forth to do the works which demand action, 
governed and directed by thought, and cour- 
age, tempered by discretion. College life 
is not to be judged by any of its factors; 
not by its leaders of thought, for they may 
become confirmed in narrow limits of 
thought and feeling ; confined to a fixed line 
of policy, they may lose facility and inven- 
tion ; limited to the leading of inferiors, they 
may become dogmatic and dictatorial, un- 
able to brook opposition or to dissemble feel- 
ing ; confronted by an everchanging public, 
they may grow careless of fresh and novel 
forms of thought and statement. Still less 
is college life to be judged by the unformed 
majority who with eager expectancy are 
looking toward the day when they shall at- 



College Life and College Learning. 103 

tain the coveted admission to full citizen- 
ship in the commonwealth of learning. 
Nor yet is the youth who has just received 
his degree — the first fruits of the mills of 
mind — the fair criterion. He exhibits, it 
is true, the molding influences in their 
final force, he has gained what there was 
to gain, has lost what it could rob him of, 
but he is not a finished product, only as yet 
a raw material. In his mind and heart are 
potentialities soon to be called into being 
by friction with public life ; in his nature 
are resources only known when demanded by 
struggle with the world ; in his soul are se- 
cret chambers in which the strength for days 
of sorrow are safely stored. These things 
are the fruitage not so much of learning as 
of life. The acutest intellect cannot be 
crammed with them, the dullest laggard 
cannot wholly miss them. They are gained 
from contact with masters whose minds are 
not more active than their hearts ; from 
classmates of many antecedents, many capa- 
cities, many purposes ; from the fellowship 
of kindred minds among masters and com- 
rades, in history, and in books. The days 



104 At the Evening Hour. 

of hardest labor have not been more abun- 
dantly productive than unconscious, yet re- 
ceptive, days of idleness under the influence 
of architecture artfully designed to meet 
the beauty of nature in landscape and sky, 
and to complete its beauty with the dignity 
and fitness of man's mastery over nature. 
Analysis fails to explain the subtle and stir- 
ring strength of such associations; yet history 
writes it on her pages with increasing fre- 
quency. It is consequently from none of 
those actually within the college circle that 
we can best judge the direction and accom- 
plishment of college life, but from those who 
carry its influence into broader fields. The 
missionary power of a church cannot be 
measured at home by fervor or fidelity to 
teaching so much as by its success in mis- 
sion fields. So the forces generated in 
college life are to be measured by the 
influence of college men on public thought. 
In estimating this influence, the world — or 
at least that part of the world which seeks 
expression for itself in the daily press — 
greatly errs in neglecting the great mass of 
earnest, faithful, inconspicuous men who 



College Life and College Learning. 105 

labor in the professions and in business, for 
the more conspicuous but less useful per- 
sons who " cut a great figure " in the world. 
Colleges were not founded to train genius 
nor to produce what the world to-day calls 
" cranks." Genius is a law unto itself. It 
does not readily " trot in harness," nor work 
well in a double team. What colleges fail 
to do in stimulating genius they make com- 
pensation for in the breaking in of erratic 
natures absorbed in self and captivated by 
splintered fragments of old ideas. The pop- 
ulist and the rag money man, the promoter 
of Baconian ciphers and theories of the lost 
tribes of Israel, the advocates of faith cures 
and theosophical societies, rarely possess the 
right to call themselves masters of arts. 
College men have learned how much there 
is to know in the world, how many-sided is 
the temple of widsom, and how hard it is to 
know even one thing to the point of true 
mastery. They are, therefore, brought face 
to face with their own limitations, and frankly 
recognize their own ignorance of anything 
that they have not honestly assailed. 
The class room has taught them but a 



106 At the Evening Hour* 

small part of this most valuable knowl- 
edge. Contact with other minds in the 
frank and free stage of growth, hating 
shams, despising pretense, denouncing trick- 
ery, ridiculing, sometimes cruelly, peculiari- 
ties, has been the chief transforming force. 
Not the brilliant lecturer, not the pains- 
taking teacher, not the richly stored library, 
works the transformation here, but the con- 
tact of man with man. The rolling stones 
in the dashing stream become the pol- 
ished pebbles. The stream is the fine 
force of master minds hurrying a miscella- 
neous collection of men through four years 
of study; contact with each other is the 
polishing influence which prevents this 
force from doing but little more than carry 
the men along four years of studious 
work. Some streams dump vast deposits 
of mud at their mouths. Here no attrition 
has taken place. Transportation is the 
only force at work. Such a stream is like 
a college where there is no real college 
life. 

These influences, so clearly seen in the 
wider world, are also seen in college. The 



College Life and College Learning. 107 

great criticism of college life in recent 
years is almost entirely directed to the con- 
duct of freshmen and sophomores. The fresh- 
men bring the uninfluenced ideas of the world 
into college life, the sophomores make a 
last stand for them. College manhood as- 
serts itself in the junior year. The average 
senior has most of the marks of the educated 
gentleman. The upper classman has grown 
to honor his teacher and his college, to love 
or at least to appreciate the value of learn- 
ing, to esteem public opinion, and to cultivate 
his own self-respect. There is an unmolded 
remnant, it is true, but it is a small and un- 
influential body. It exhibits our inevitable 
human nature, and it is the honor of our 
college life that the unassimilated element 
is so small, not its shame that such an ele- 
ment exists. 

It is no exaggeration to say that her col- 
lege men have made America what she is, 
nor that college life has been quite as strong 
a force in making them as college learning. 
The country college with its dormitory and 
its curriculum and its constant contact and 
grinding of man with man has done, and 



108 At the Evening Hour. 

must continue to do, a great work for our 
country. The professor who is content to 
be a pedagogue and help form the thought 
as well as inform the mind, who is anxious 
to elevate the character, and save the souls, as 
well as supply food for the brain of his 
pupils, is the highest influence in such col- 
lege life, and without him the stream grows 
sluggish, the stones are not carried along, 
contact is not fresh and forceful. The small 
college with a faculty loving learning and 
serving God is the place in which college 
life reaches its freest and finest and fullest 
development. From such institutions we 
may hope to see men constantly coming 
forth valuing truth more than success, use- 
fulness more than prosperity, and the service 
of God more than the service of self. 



, IbiHI 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

029 822 678 9 



■L 






n h 






